Tag Archives: The Infrastructural City

“…we have radical abundance propped up by massive debt. Even though consumption is still rampant, we have passed the point of needing to produce more things as a society…Our growing relationship to our objects, or props, is that of a programmer to bits of code. As programmers we assemble these pieces of code into a […]

“Hiding its presence from public view, the cell tower camouflaged as a palm tree becomes an appropriate icon for the private infrastructural network of our day” [image source] In Varnelis’ Infrastructural City, Ted Kane and Rick Miller’s chapter “Cell Structure” provides a systemic view of corporate urbanism. The authors explore this urbanism by mapping the […]

[Clouds passing through San Fransisco’s Mt. Sutro forest] (Note: this post is part of the Infrastructural City Blogiscussion. Click here for mammoth’s introduction to this chapter) In addition to Los Angeles’ Palm trees, Warren Techentin’s Tree Huggers Chapter briefly mentions that the most widely planted non-native trees in California were varieties of the Australian Eucalyptus, […]

(Note: this post is part of the Infrastructural City Blogiscussion. Click here for mammoth’s introduction to this chapter) Warren Techentin’s Tree Huggers (chapter seven of Varnelis’ Infrastructural City) explores the impending fate of Los Angeles’ iconic, yet water-consumptive palm trees. As the city seeks to create a more multi-functional urban forest, the nearly shadeless […]

The Infrastructural City Blogiscussion: Reading Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s Blocking All Lanes, (introduced by mammoth here) [Flickr user Zsolti/NYM] Blocking All Lanes begins by asking a very basic question — what is traffic? As the authors point out, we typically emphasize the vehicular steel container rather than its contents when referring to traffic. […]

The Infrastructural City: Reading Matthew Coolidge’s Margins in our Midst: Gravel (introduced by mammoth here) [Gravel barges, from Flickr user mistert2) Sites of resource extraction and mining are perhaps the best locations to demonstrate the networked ecology of urbanism. The massive voids and distorted terrains created by the borrowing of material from one landscape for […]